


an (incomplete) list of things kisaragi tseng learned in his first year of exile

by synecdochic



Series: lullabye for the new world order [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-23
Updated: 2011-05-23
Packaged: 2018-05-31 20:17:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6486028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/pseuds/synecdochic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tseng's arrival in Midgar involved a great deal of culture shock. For all parties involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an (incomplete) list of things kisaragi tseng learned in his first year of exile

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally [posted](https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/471829.html) 2011-05-23.)
> 
> Written from a prompt by ivorygates: she prompted "Tseng's first month in Midgar", and I broadened that to "first year". Like _Lullabye for the New World Order_ , which it's a part of, it uses ridiculous amounts of personal canon and uses only the original game as canon, with very ( _very_ ) scattered bits of the rest of the Compilation for flavor; it specifically discards all Shinra/Avalanche backstory. I borrowed much of Reeve from traxits, and much of Wutai from scattered bits of Japanese history with a heavy flavor of Darkover.

**1\. Shinra's computer system -- something by which they live and die; if the computer does not know of it, it does not exist -- is not set up to handle his name**. When he is speaking with the "intake counselor" -- a polite euphemism it will take him months to decode into its proper meaning of "intelligence debriefing officer" -- he is asked what his name is. He provides it unthinkingly in the proper fashion, family name first, given name second, and spends the remainder of interview after interview thinking Shinra's people are shockingly informal as they call him _Tseng_ , nothing more. It isn't until he meets Verdot and is addressed as _Mr. Tseng_ that he realizes the mistake. 

It would have haunted him his entire tenure with Shinra, save that three weeks after he is begrudgingly given his own living quarters, he awakens in the middle of the night as hands close on his shoulders, bearing him down into the too-soft mattress he has yet to figure out how to replace, and before him (in the dark, clothed in shadows) his eldest brother looks at him with a stranger's face, holding a heated brand. "You are dead to us," his brother says, "and I mark you so that from this moment any loyal son of the Sun may claim that death," and he'd known it was coming and resolved to face it with dignity and without fear, but that resolution doesn't make it any easier to bear.

He heals the brand in the morning with the new Restore materia he'd been issued (thus ensuring it will forever scar, but then again, it was meant to). At lunch, Verdot looks at him assessingly before saying, "Come on. I'll take you down to HR and we can make a few changes to your records." 

(Not all Turks have historically gone by only one name, but after Tseng, they all do, and the records clerks learn to stop complaining.)

 

 **2\. Shinra's people, for all their mastery over materia and magic, have enshrined science and technology until it is like unto a god to them, and it has displaced the gods that were and are.** Oh, they still swear by the old gods; Midgar has half-abandoned temples to Ramuh and Ifrit, Shiva and Bahamut (although Tseng can find none to Wutai's gods, but then again, he doesn't look too closely) and Shinra pays lip service, at least, to the days of Festival. But to most of Midgar's children, Festival is an excuse to stay home from work, to drink too much and parade licentiously through the streets half-naked, nothing more. He has never seen a single one of them show any sign of true belief.

Tseng has spent most of his life attempting to rid himself of that belief -- having decided, at age sixteen, that if Wutai's gods would not care for her, he would not care for Them -- but he is a child of Wutai's arts, once called the greatest adept of his generation, and he has learned all those arts as thoroughly as befits that status, including the sense of the world he once thought was inherent to all mankind. He spends the first six months of his residence in Midgar standing barefoot each morning on the floor of the quarters they have given him, working his way through the patterns he knows as thoroughly as breathing, and each morning he is left thoroughly disquieted when he reaches the point where he, deep in the trance of motion and open to the flow of every heartbeat and soul-fire around him, is bombarded with the _presence_ of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- who have, apparently, never learned to _keep themselves still_.

He begins to bring it up to Blaze once, thinking to ask whether others have this problem as well or whether he simply has not yet learned how to integrate the consciousness of so many people (more than he has ever seen before, more than inhabit all of Wutai's shores, more than live or ever have lived beneath the banner of the Sun Empire from the time of its founding, all crammed into a space half the size of Wutai's capitol) into his own sense of _that-which-is_. Blaze stares at him blankly when he is no more than two sentences in, however, and it does not take Tseng long to realize the reason none of his new countrymen have ever learned to keep themselves still is that none of them have the capacity to sense that awareness of the world around them Tseng has never lived without.

(It takes him eight months of constant migraines from all the _Leviathan-damned noise_ before he realizes it's probably a mercy, and learns to stop listening.)

 

 **3\. His knowledge of the language is nowhere near where he thought it was.** The-Emperor-his-father, all praise to his name, ordered all his children to learn enough to get by in, but Midgar's common tongue (rapidly becoming the default language of the world, with Shinra's expansion) is different enough from Wutaian to be a _stone bitch_ to learn, and he'd never been quite as devoted to his studies as he should have been. He can read Plains standard much better than he can speak it, and the crisply-exaggerated, enunciated pronunciation his tutors used bears no resemblance to the quick, slurring delivery he hears around him now. He can understand what is being said, can make himself understood in return, but the task is not easy, and it takes up entirely too much of his effort.

Acquiring a better understanding of the language is his first priority for quite some time afterwards. He watches hours of television daily, everything from news broadcasts to "comedies" to "soap operas" (the etymology and provenance thereof he never _will_ understand, much less the contents). He knows better than to think the worlds depicted on camera are anything like the world he now lives in, but they are useful guides to what a citizen of Midgar is likely to believe, and over time, he slowly learns to listen for the words as they are actually spoken and not as they should be. (The news makes more sense once he learns greater understanding; the soap operas are a lost cause.)

The accent will plague him for at least the first few years, no matter how viciously he works to shed it, even once his comprehension is as swift as a native speaker's. Midgar's citizens are not accustomed to seeing Wutai's children on her streets, and those they do see are often second and third generation, children of those brought here as prisoners from the first war Midgar fought with Wutai forty years gone or of offspring of Midgar soldiers and Wutai's women that the-Emperor-his-father insisted Midgar care for after Wutai's surrender was complete. Shinra's policies are utterly unlike that of the government they displaced, however, and Shinra's soldiers kill or release, rather than capture. There are few of his (former) countrymen living in Midgar now, and those who do live here generally pronounce themselves Midgar natives within two words once they open their mouths.

When Tseng speaks, his words stamped with Wutai's liquid syllables and his sentences structured backwards from how Midgar's children would construct them, he instantly becomes foreign, _other_ , and even once his grammar and composition is textbook-perfect, the rhythms of his speech give him away. His difficulty with the language does offer him a useful rubric for calculating the measure of others, however. Verdot simply slows his speech slightly and avoids contractions as much as possible. Reeve doesn't change anything about the way he talks, although he's constantly scanning Tseng's face to make sure Tseng understands, and adopts the habit of re-framing and re-summarizing his sentences as smoothly as though he's doing it for his own benefit, not Tseng's, as soon as he sees signs that Tseng has stopped understanding. Heidegger speaks slowly and loudly, using words suitable for a toddler, and tends to speak to others in the room as though Tseng were not even present.

(Over the years he will find that those first sets of impressions, and how much another person was willing to work with him to make sure he understood without treating him like a child, are as good a measure of a person's worth as he can find. The last few years of his accented speech, before he adopts the clipped, nasal vowels of the old-Plains aristocratic accent that carries the highest social value among Midgar's children, are for no other reason than he is loathe to give up that advantage.)

 

 **4\. Midgar's men are expected to wear garments of tight cloth _binding their genitals_ underneath everything they wear.** As a matter of course. With no thought to how easy it is to move in them.

This discovery horrifies him so fiercely that he loses all ability to explain; it takes half an hour, standing in the "dressing room" of the clothing-maker's shop, for Blaze (who is to be his native guide in the process of getting him as settled as he is likely to become) to understand what he's trying to say. He's reduced to gesturing widely and ranting in his own language, and it isn't until he puts on the _briefs_ and demonstrates a high kick (nearly fracturing the mirror as well as nearly tearing off his own balls), then takes them off and does the same -- showing that the difference between his reach without the offending garment is nearly a full foot -- that Blaze finally clues in and tells him to wait. The under-garments Blaze brings back are more like loose-cut _jinbei_ than the tight triangle he'd given Tseng the first time, and they are far more acceptable. 

(He later realizes that there is a wide variety of underwear styles available, and Blaze had -- as a matter of course -- picked out the same underwear he himself wore; Tseng settles on boxer-briefs as his preferred underwear choice, and learns to move in them well enough. He learns to request that the tailor include extra material in the seams of his pants, and discovers that a properly-tailored suit can be just as comfortable and easy to move in as _karasan-bakama_ and _naga-juban_ , and finds all the places in Little Wutai where he can obtain _uwagi_ and _hakama_ for the days when he feels the need to wear something that doesn't (still, perpetually) feel like a costume. He even eventually finds a place that carries _etchū fundoshi_ , but by then, he's so used to Midgar-style underwear that it takes him twenty minutes to remember how to wrap one.)

 

 **5\. There are people in Midgar -- in Shinra, even -- who are interested in Wutai's culture for itself, and not for what an understanding of it can bring in terms of tactical advantage.** Reeve is the most prominent: he finally confesses that his grandmother had been Wutaian, that his grandfather had been a Midgar soldier, and his father a result of the actions so many of Wutai's women from outlying villages had taken during that first occupation to distract Midgar's soldiers from their greater goal. (Even today, those women are honored as warriors among Wutai's people, in a way women so rarely are, for all that half of them chose to send the children that resulted to Midgar rather than allow those children to endure the prejudice held against those who are only half Wutaian.) 

Reeve himself had been raised completely ignorant of his Wutaian heritage -- not because it is considered shameful here, Tseng learns (it isn't even remarked upon), but because his father had no real way to learn of it, and no true desire -- but he keeps coming back to Tseng over those first few months, offering help in acclimating and a listening ear as much as he can. The questions Reeve asks are genuine curiosity, not the spectacle-gazing that so many others here seem to indulge in, and Tseng answers them gladly: talking about home _hurts_ , in a way he hadn't quite expected, but seeing the way Reeve's eyes light up as Tseng describes things that were so much a part of him it takes Reeve's questions for him to realize they are different here, he realizes that the hurt is balanced by a soft and quiet satisfaction, seeing someone else value these things he had never quite known enough to value while he still had them.

It is Reeve's curiosity that keeps Tseng from fully renouncing his Wutaian cultural heritage along with his citizenship and his birthright. Tseng realizes, much later, that the process of picking through everything he had been taught to find the pieces he could offer Reeve was what forced him to do the same for himself, to evaluate all that he had been taught through the lens of what he should or could keep, in this new life, and what should be jettisoned along with his titles and the future his family had tried to force him into. 

(Years later, when Tseng is deep in meditation on the night of Leviathan's Vigil, his stomach gnawing against his ribs in anticipation of breaking his fast, feeling the same peace and calm he has always felt, he realizes how easy it would have been for him to give up everything that had made him, and he is quietly thankful that Reeve worked up enough courage to ask. The process of having been forced to _choose_ each piece he would retain and each piece he would discard has given him an understanding of himself that all too few people ever reach. He is a child of two worlds and always will be, "neither fish nor foul nor good red herring" as his student would no doubt quote at him, but he has chosen each piece _himself_ , rather than having it thrust upon him, and that alone is worth every moment he has spent in the choosing.)

 

 **6\. Midgar's children truly _do_ view themselves as the center of the world.** He'd expected to be forced to justify his decision to defect, over and over again, to anyone and everyone, and had prepared a series of answers ranging from very near to the truth (that he had seen the writing on the wall and realized Shinra would conquer Wutai thoroughly in no more than another generation, and he had no desire to be on the losing side, which is in fact the truth but not the truth entire) to the outrageous, to simply telling his interlocutor that it was none of their business.

Nobody asks.

Oh, the "intake counselor" does, and the men whose job it is to evaluate his sincerity and determine whether or not he is intended to be a Wutaian spy -- they, as well as a few others at the highest echelons of Shinra, know the significance of the Kisaragi name, although he is careful to leave them the impression that he is a distant cousin rather than his father's youngest son, without ever outright _lying_ \-- but the others he encounters, once the intelligence analysts have had done with him, never once question him. They assume that of _course_ anyone with any sense would want to move to Midgar, that of _course_ any of Midgar's children with any sense would be honored to work for Shinra, much less at the levels Tseng is privileged to reach as part of the Department of Administrative Research. 

It isn't that he _wanted_ to have to justify himself to everyone he met, but the casual assumption he encounters over and over again just _bothers_ him. By the end of the first month, he's taken to responding to people who congratulate him for having the sense to come to Midgar with the most outrageous lies about Wutai he can come up with.

(At one point, long after Tseng has forgotten how _annoying_ people had been in those days, Rude is reading a sociology journal in the Turks lounge one slow afternoon, and when Tseng asks him what's so funny, Rude shows him an article that takes some of the biggest lies he'd told back then as honest truth and analyzes them in the context of what it implies about Wutaian society. Tseng winds up laughing so hard that Reno panicks and begins first aid, and later frames the article and hangs it on the "Turks' Greatest Hits" wall.)

 

 **7\. Shinra's world dominance has nothing to do with capability, or drive, or ambition, or intelligence, or skill, or any of the other virtues Tseng ascribed to them before he knew the truth.** He'd spent months -- years -- trying to imagine what Shinra's rulers were like, how smart and driven and capable they must be to have conquered the world so thoroughly in a single generation with a minimum of bloodshed. To have seen the opportunity inherent in Mako energy and have seized it so completely, coming to rule the world with power and not through military might. He'd made his decisions based, in no small part, on the thought that a company like the company Shinra must be would have use for a man like him, smart and driven and capable himself.

When he discovers the truth -- that Shinra's ascendancy was in no small part an accident instead of the result of deliberate policy decisions, that Augustus Shinra may have intended to conquer the world's economy some day but Jonathan Shinra cares about little more than how much he can squeeze out of his customers, that there is _at most_ one intelligent person on Shinra's board of directors and the rest are useless fools -- he spends a full week wondering _what the hell he's done_. He doesn't regret his decision to defect -- given his surviving brothers' ill health and their family's notorious fertility problems, there were better-than-average odds that upon his father's death he would have been left either with the throne or next in line, and he _knows_ he would make a piss-poor Emperor of a subjugated nation -- but discovering that one's homeland is in the process of being conquered by idiots? That just _galls_.

(Of course, the converse of that realization doesn't take long to present itself to him: that in the environment Shinra has proven to be, a smart, driven, capable man can go far, if he takes considerable care to select his strategies with a full understanding of the politics involved. Tseng has been playing complicated games of courts and politics his entire life; it doesn't take him long until he is confident he understands the players well enough to begin his game of _go_. He can afford to take the long view.)

 

 **8\. The things they call food here are disgusting.** The things they call _Wutaian food_ here are unrecognizeable. (The things they call alcohol here are often just as bad, but at least he can usually find one bar willing to import _sake_ for him, and he develops a taste for Midgar's beer after enough times of being hauled out drinking with the rest of the Turks.) He hadn't expected he would find all of his favorite foods in Midgar, but he'd thought he would at least be able to find something _edible_.

He tries teaching himself how to cook out of self-defense after one too many nights of being hauled out for "chocobo wings" (if those blobs of gristle and sauce have ever been anywhere near a chocobo in his entire life, he will eat the chocobo's feathers; they'd probably taste better) and one too many afternoons of lunch in the Shinra cafeterias (where he can't identify anything he is being fed, and is probably happier not knowing). The results are even worse than the cafeteria; after the third time the fire department is called out to respond to reports of smoke filling the entire building, he just gives up and resigns himself to eating garbage and living on coffee (the one thing Midgar cuisine has that Wutaian doesn't, and it alone is almost worth the rest) for the rest of his life.

(Eventually, he concludes that Midgar has everything _else_ available for sale; why not good food? He tackles the problem logically, like he would tackle a work assignment, building lists and working through all of Midgar-Above's restaurants, from the tiny hole-in-the-wall joints to the thousand-gil-a-plate gourmet restaurants, until he has assembled a list of acceptable options. It takes him a few years to realize that he has become, by default, the person who selects the restaurant whenever they go out, and the person that everyone comes to for restaurant recommendations. He's pondering a restaurant reviewer gig with _Midgar Alive!_ magazine as a retirement career. If he lives that long.)

 

 **9\. Midgar's women are shockingly direct and forward.** He'd steeled himself against the knowledge that standards of dress and modesty are not universal -- as a child, his year-mates had smuggled in pictures from Midgar and passed them around like pornography, and he'd seen enough images of women _with their hair unbound_ , women and men who _cut their hair short_ , that he'd known the rules would be different. He can handle seeing women parading around in little more than their underwear; he can handle seeing the napes of men's necks; he can handle the way nudity is alternately fetishized and scandalous here. (It takes him a long time to figure out the rules of when he's allowed to be naked in non-mixed-gender company without being thought uncivilized: in Wutai, nudity taboos exist only cross-gender, and he thinks nothing of stripping in front of the other male Turks. It takes Kailas pulling him aside and gently informing him that Midgar's nudity taboos extend to _everyone_ save intimates before he realizes the origin of the strange looks he's been getting.)

What he can't handle -- at least, not at first -- is the way women (and a few men) seem to think nothing of walking up to him -- often in the halls of the Shinra building -- and proposing fornication. The first three times it happens, he assumes they are pleasure-workers hired by Shinra for the morale of their employees and declines politely; he doesn't think he's established enough in Shinra yet to take advantage of a pleasure-worker's services when he should be concentrating on his work instead. (Eventually, he realizes they are fellow employees just like him, and _that_ makes him not only realize that courtship in Midgar is handled by the couple themselves, but _also_ that sexual relations among unmarried opposite-gender people who are not pleasure-workers aren't taboo here _at all_. The thought shocks him more than he'd thought he was capable of being shocked.)

It isn't until Reeve makes a gentle, low-key, stammering offer one night when they're in Tseng's apartment after dinner that Tseng realizes he has someone to ask about it, and Reeve (once he realizes that Tseng is genuinely baffled and not offended) is remarkably helpful in his analysis. It makes a lot of the most confusing elements of the television Tseng has been watching come clear: the process of spending time with a person of one's desired gender for romantic purposes is called _dating_ , men and women are both equally likely to propose a _date_ to someone they have romantic or sexual interest in, sexual activity is not guaranteed at the end of a _date_ but generally one's partner will not be offended if one proposes the activity, one is not limited to _dating_ only those whom one would be willing to marry, and it is not at all unheard-of for two people to _date_ solely for the purpose of that sexual activity.

By the time Reeve is finished -- having lost the stammer and shyness partway through as he lays out the analysis with an engineer's thoroughness -- Tseng is horribly certain that he has accidentally led Reeve to believe that their evenings out are, in fact, _dates_. When he, mortified, apologizes to Reeve for not having realized, the stammer comes back as Reeve hastens to assure him that he didn't think that in the least, then launches into a complicated explanation of same-gender _dating_ practice in Midgar society that leaves Tseng even more confused. Eventually they work out that Reeve is trying to explain that same-gender _dating_ didn't become more socially acceptable in Midgar until a generation or two ago, and Reeve is worried that Tseng will be offended at the idea (or offended that Reeve would think him interested). 

Once they get _that_ straightened out, Tseng explains to Reeve that same-gender sexual activity is the _only_ form of sexual activity that's culturally permitted in Wutai, save with those who have chosen to be pleasure-workers (who are, Reeve explains, called _prostitutes_ or _escorts_ here in Midgar, and whose social status is shockingly low). The resulting discussion about social status, cultural sexual practices, marriage customs, and the like lasts so long that Reeve forgets he even made the proposition, and when Tseng decides to say yes -- based, he will admit, mostly on how intelligently and open-mindedly Reeve approaches the discussion -- he has to remind Reeve of what started the whole thing. They're still laughing about it when Tseng leads Reeve back to his bedroom, where they find that certain forms of cross-cultural communication work perfectly well no matter how awkward their origins.

(Over time, Tseng gets more used to the idea, until after a while, he barely even registers it when people proposition him. He still feels horribly transgressive every time he sleeps with a woman, however, and he's pretty sure he always will.)

 

**10\. His being here isn't _anywhere near_ an accident.**

That's the hardest thing to swallow. When he first conceived the plan he would eventually execute, he was convinced it was him running away from the destiny the gods had decreed for him, and he'd been fine with that: he doesn't believe in the gods anymore. (Or rather, he's trying not to believe in the gods anymore; most of the time he's successful, but there are moments where he's convinced the gods still believe in _him_.) The fact that he would be walking away from the path the gods had laid out for his life was the least of the things he agonized over before deciding to exile himself forever, and for all that he's tried to stop believing in predestination and divine intervention, he's self-aware enough to admit that the thought of pointing the soles of his feet at the gods and striding off to do his own thing instead was at least _slightly_ satisfying.

But when four months have passed and he is _finally_ released from the clutches of the intelligence analysts, finally taken to Verdot and told Shinra has found a place for him, finally given _something to do_ that isn't being wrung dry of all the secrets he can provide, Verdot grimaces and apologizes up front: Tseng is told that President Shinra wishes for Tseng to be assigned to full-time bodyguarding duty, teaching his charge everything he can of Wutai's arts, and Verdot knows just enough of Wutai to know that assignment is an insult, through and through. (The task of bodyguarding is honorable service, and something Tseng does not mind in the least. To be ordered to divulge Wutai's arts to one who is not of the Temple, though, is a transgression for which the only possible punishment is death. Tseng bites back the explanation that he has already been marked as traitor; once damned, one cannot be damned further. Still. The insult -- and insult it is meant to be -- grates.)

When Tseng learns who his student is to be, though, insult becomes opportunity with a single name.

Rufus Shinra, eleven years old, is sitting in the study of his father's penthouse when Tseng is taken to him for an introduction, reading an economics textbook far beyond the reach of his years. He looks up from it when Verdot enters the room, Tseng on his heels, and the minute Tseng's eyes meet that cool, ice-blue gaze, Tseng very nearly has to sit down on the floor right where he stands. The child is no child: the soul behind those eyes is ancient, cool and composed, already having learned to keep its own counsel and show nothing to those around it. The hair on the back of Tseng's neck stands up. He can see the shade of the child's destiny wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, so thick and heavy it is the last thing that convinces him Midgar's children truly cannot see with eyes beyond the physical, for it to have gone unnoticed for so long.

He has to keep himself from going to one knee right then and there, bending his head and baring his neck, saying _here I am; I've arrived at last; take me instead._ Not to the child himself, but to the destiny he sees riding the poor boy. He can tell it has already used him cruelly, and he can see, spinning out in the future's promise, the knowledge that such hard use will only become harder. It is only the knowledge that he can see his own destiny irrevocably entwined with the boy's, the knowledge that he has been brought here specifically to bear the poor child up and keep him from falling, that keeps him from starting to curse the gods and not stopping until he is struck down for blasphemy or penned away for being a madman. Instead, he steps forward, bows (as deeply as he can, although he knows none here will recognize what it means), and introduces himself. Rufus watches him the whole time, eyes giving nothing away.

It takes six months of patient teaching before Rufus is willing to open up to him, even a little, and over a year before he thinks Rufus has come to trust him even slightly. By the time Rufus is thirteen, Tseng is certain the fate of the world will come to rest on those slender shoulders someday, and resolves to do everything he can to help the boy prepare. By the time Rufus is sixteen and decrees that it is time for them to become lovers -- something Tseng has seen coming for at least two years, although he hadn't expected it to be quite so _soon_ \-- Tseng knows that Rufus owns him, wholly, thoroughly, and completely. By the time Rufus is twenty-two, Tseng knows _something_ is coming even if he doesn't know precisely when, some moment when the destiny he's seen riding Rufus since that very first meeting will speak up and make itself known.

(Whatever it is, however it comes, he can only hope he has taught Rufus well enough, and that whatever it is won't break him under its heels. The gods are not often kind to those They have chosen. He doesn't expect Rufus will be any more lucky than he was.)

He will never tell Rufus what he was thinking in that moment, or how he has come to believe that every single _fucking_ action he took up to the point he walked into that room had been the gods guiding his footsteps, even -- especially -- when he believed he was most free. Rufus has come to believe in him, in his loyalty and his commitment, in his dedication to Rufus (always, eternally) and his belief in Rufus's worth, but Rufus's upbringing left its scars. He will do nothing that could possibly make Rufus suspect he is not here willingly, and even after this long, he doesn't have the words in Midgar's language to explain that no matter _how_ angry he is at the gods for Their interference, he still wouldn't change a thing.


End file.
